When it comes to recruiting and geography, there are two questions that matter to coaching staffs. Where are the players? And is it worth my time to try to convince them to come to my school? Everything else that is remotely interesting or relevant is an offshoot of one of these questions.

Let's talk about the second question first. It's true that, even among players already ranked in the top 100, higher rated prospects are often willing to travel farther for college. Obviously, there's no reason to believe that top 10 players are inherently a different group than the next 90, to the point that they'd be willing to move across larger distances. Instead, coaches from farther away think it's worth their time to work their recruiting magic on the top 10 guys. There's absolutely no reason to believe this doesn't continue to be true all the way down to Division III, and this creates an analytical problem.

We can look at all the numbers we want, but, in the end it's all a two-way street. For example, Louisiana prospects have an abnormally high rate of staying in-state (59 percent). This could be because Louisiana culture is such that prospects prefer to stay close to home. It could also be because there just isn't much of an out-of-state presence in the state. To take the numbers of this type from being interesting to being useful, one needs to understand that these tangles exist. I am not capable of untangling them. Not today, at least. Ideas are welcome. Tons of raw data on the subject can be found in Appendix A, below.

So, we come back to the question: Where are the players? First, let's talk international. For pure talent available vs. level of (American college) competition, there's no better place to look than abroad. Saint Mary's Australian pipeline has certainly been good to them. Gonzaga likes to work Canada, and German Elias Harris was an outstanding freshman find two years ago. So why is it that FIBA's No. 1 ranked nation, Argentina, donated just one prospect to the NCAA in 2010 (Juan Fernandez of Temple)? Same for New Zealand, ranked 13th in the world, and Anglophones to boot. That's not to say it's surprising that there are so few international prospects here, but, for pure untapped talent, that's still your best bet.

Turning stateside, I tried to determine which areas are being over-recruited and which are being under-recruited by running a multiple regression. You can find the nuts and bolts in Appendix B, below, but it essentially works out like this: I used the number of high-major players from a state to estimate the number of total players from a state, then adjusted for walk-ons by using the number of Division I schools in the state and allowed for the possibility of a down cycle for each state by using state population. So, if you think that one of the states listed here as "under-recruited" is not, you're essentially saying one of three things:

1. The state is top-heavy. There are a bunch of high-major talents, but not much else. Or, the top players in the area end up at high-major schools but aren't really high-major talents.
2. Walk-ons in that state are rarely in-state prospects.
3. The state is churning out more high-major talent than usual right now, which makes its overall talent pool look like it should hold more.

The opposite arguments would thus be held to apply for states listed as "over-recruited."

There look to be ten states that, with some level of confidence, we can claim are under-recruited: Alabama, Arkansas, Kentucky, Michigan, New York, Oklahoma, Oregon, South Carolina, Washington, and Wisconsin. New York and South Carolina top the list (both being under their expected number of Division I prospects by 30 or more), with Oregon and Washington also seeing very significant differences. Let's take a closer look at a few of these potentially under-recruited locales.

New York
This one makes a great deal of sense to me. If you take New York City out of the population of New York, you still have about as many people as Kentucky, Louisiana, or South Carolina can claim. But if you're going on a recruiting trip to "New York," you're going to NYC. There are so many players to see there that it seems wrong to avoid it. The DaJuan Colemans and Tobias Harrises of the world still make themselves known, but the mid-major talents of the rest of the state can be easily forgotten.

South Carolina
There's a similar dynamic at work here. The traditional recruiting swing through the South has key stops in Georgia (234 D-I players), North Carolina (206), Florida (213), Virginia (156), and Tennessee (138). South Carolina only had 63 players in D-I last year, but 18 of them were high-major. For comparison, the above states (who had between two and six times as many total players as SC), sent 60, 37, 39, 32, and 25 high-major players, respectively. Those are numbers that suggest untapped talent in the forgotten South Carolina. (Kentucky, Alabama, and Arkansas can make similar claims.)

Oregon and Washington
These neighboring states share a common recruiting affliction: the sheer size of California. A "west coast" trip can be quite easily confined to the Golden State alone, with no ventures further north. Oklahoma has the same problem with regard to Texas. Michigan and Wisconsin are somewhat pushed aside by the standard Illinois-Indiana-Ohio swing.

It's really pretty simple. If you want to find the players other people don't know about, go places the other people don't see. Take a look around upstate New York or Oregon or Wisconsin instead of NYC and LA and Chicago.

On the other side of the coin we have solid evidence that five states are over-recruited: Florida, Minnesota, New Jersey, North Carolina, and Ohio. Of these five, one really stands out.

New Jersey
Much of New Jersey's population is concentrated around New York City, meaning that when coaches recruit the NYC area they get to everyone from Jersey (much more so than the overall state of New York). And all the people not in NYC are in Trenton, which is, for all intents and purposes, a suburb of Philadelphia. In other words the kids in Jersey will be tracked down one way or another. Actually, Minnesota's the same way -- its talent is conveniently concentrated around one specific place. If you've scouted the Twin Cities, you've scouted Minnesota. Check out these population density maps.

North Carolina, Ohio, and Florida
All three have multiple major recruiting events. Every decent player from these states will probably be there. And all three have at least 13 (!) D-I programs in-state. One of those programs will have a clue about a decent player who's not at the events. Simply put, the paths in these states are very well-traveled.

There's evidence that Nevada is likely over-recruited as well, but the sample size is so small I don't trust it. (Only Elijah Johnson of Kansas was a high-major Nevadan in 2010.) Other states with lots of events (e.g., Texas, California) are so big they can't possibly draw everyone from the whole state. Similarly, Illinois' biggest events are Chicago-based, and the large downstate population group closer to St. Louis doesn't flock to them.

These aren't necessarily the only states that the numbers spit out. These are the states that the numbers spit out that make sense and were difficult to refute. For example, Tennessee was a state pegged as over-recruited, but that's because Memphis, the university, picks up so many in-state high-major talents. (The Tigers had eight Tennesseans in 2010.) This means that Tennessee's output of high-major players looks low, since Memphis is still considered mid-major, and so the state's talent level is underestimated by the system.

Drew Cannon is a college student and a regular contributor to Basketball Prospectus. Follow him on Twitter at @DrewCannon1.

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We ran a multiple regression on number of Division I players in the state, using number of D-I schools, number of high-major players from the state, and state population as regressors. The assumptions were:

1. Each state has a similar distribution of talent (i.e., if two states have the same number of high-major players, then they should have similar numbers of mid-major and low-major players).
2. High-major players will make themselves known on a national level regardless of their region.
So we used number of high-major players as an indicator of talent level for the state, then adjusted for number of schools in the state (so that states would get no extra credit for walk-ons, who normally come from nearby) and state population (to adjust for random variation in number of high-major players currently in the NCAA as opposed to being regularly in the NCAA). The actual equation used was:

Then we checked the number of actual D-I players versus the number of expected D-I players. If there were fewer current players than expected, then the state was considered under-recruited. If there were more current players than expected, then the state was considered over-recruited.

We ran another regression without including the state population variable (because the assumptions underlying it weren't quite airtight despite its statistical significance at every confidence level) and used it to temper conclusions about states when the two were in disagreement.

I'm open to more discussion about this if anyone's still curious about the results or methods.

Drew Cannon is an author of Basketball Prospectus.
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One issue with Wisconsin being 'under-recruited' is that there are 2 High Major and 2 Mid-Major schools, but no Low Major school; so anyone who stays in state ends up in one of those two categories. Wisconsin also has one of the strongest D-III conferences (WIAC - seven (I think) national titles in the last 20ish years) in the country; that conference probably absorbs a fair number of the Low-Major type players from Wisconsin who want to stay local.